This invention relates to a packaging system. It has been known to form a system incorporating both a packaging machine and a printer for making packages. Japanese Patent Publication Tokkai 4-128105, for example, disclosed such a system incorporating a so-called vertical pillow type form-fill-seal package maker and a printer. An elongated bag-making material, herein referred to as the film, is pulled out of a roll and after data such as the date of production of the packaged products are printed thereon by the printer, the film is bent and made into a tubular form by means of a longitudinal sealer adapted to seal the mutually overlapped side edges of the film together. After articles to be packaged are dropped into this tubularly formed film, it is transversely sealed above the articles captured inside and cut, and this production process is repeated.
Since films with different sizes and different designs thereon are used for producing packaged products of different kinds, however, the initial position at which the printer should start printing also changes, depending on the kind of products to be made. Thus, data related to the printing such as the printing position must be set, as well as packaging conditions such as the width and the length of the bags to be formed, for each of different kinds of products to be packaged. Such setting operations are cumbersome to perform because the conditions for the packaging and the data related to the printing are separately set by using independent controllers of the packaging machine and the printer, respectively. Moreover, every time the kind of products to be produced is changed, not only new packaging conditions but also new data for the printing corresponding to these packaging conditions must be set. Thus, errors have been likely to occur in setting these conditions and data.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide an improved packaging system incorporating a printer with which data for the printing can be easily set corresponding to a selected packaging condition such that errors in the setting of these data are not likely to occur.
A packaging system embodying this invention, with which the above and other objects can be accomplished, may be characterized as comprising not only a packaging machine of a known kind, which transports a bag-making film, forms it into a tubular form, fills it with articles to be packaged and seals it to produce a packaged product, and a printer, also of a known kind, disposed along the film path for making prints on the film, but also a packaging condition memory which stores packaging conditions for operating the packaging machine, a print data memory which stores print data for operating the printer, and a correlation data memory which stores the print data in correlation with the packaging conditions. These memories are parts of a control unit for the system and, when a packaging condition is selected through an input device, not only is the packaging machine operated under the specified condition but also the printer is operated by the data which correspond to the selected packaging condition according to correlation data stored in the correlation data memory.
With a system thus characteristically structured, the packaging conditions for the packaging machine and the print data for the printer can be set automatically, and hence easily, in a properly correlated manner. Since this correlation is stored in one of its memory devices, errors in matching a packaging condition and print data can be reliably avoided. Throughout herein, the expression xe2x80x9cpackaging conditionsxe2x80x9d is used to indicate conditions for operating the packaging machine such as the length and width of the bags to be produced and the number of packaged products to be produced thereby. Expressions xe2x80x9cprint dataxe2x80x9d will be used to indicate items such as the position of printing, the font and size of the characters to be printed, and the intervals between characters and lines of characters.